Book Review: Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story
Katie 
You know I love myself some technology, so when I saw this was a book about a magic iphone, I was all in. My first mistake was choosing what book to read next by which had the best ranking on Good Reads of the 3 I still had to read for this month. Cracked won out with a 5 star ranking – so I think I hyped the book up way too much based on that. I’d give it more in the range of 3 stars.
The book reads almost like a telanovela (think Jane the Virgin) with the narrator stepping in to explain things here and there like how nicknames of characters didn’t come about until later in the story but they’d start calling them by the name now and how some characters are being mentioned only in passing. I wasn’t particularly a fan of this approach. The book is set in Seattle – which is cool – but I’ve never been there so I couldn’t tell you how accurate it is or not. (Since the author is from Seattle I’ll assume it’s spot on)
Anyway… The main character is Morena and she is getting over a break up when an iPhone shows up addressed to her but only has one app. It’s a dating app similar to Urban Spoon (something I am familiar with) and every time she shakes the phone it would ding and then she’d get the attention of a guy nearby who would want to date her. Cool, but strange, especially when she was agreeing to date guys that she totally wasn’t into at all – and kept dating them until he became a psycho stalker.
A sub plot to the book is the gaming that Morena does with her roomate, Suzyn and another guy – “Magic Guy” who actually is a magical being and tells her that the iPhone is dark magic but they don’t believe him.
Probably a book for someone who is a bit more into sci-fi than I guess I am.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
What can your phone do for you?
This is the story of a girl and her iPhone. No, that’s not quite right. This is the story of a middle-aged statistician and her best friend. Though she didn’t consider herself middle-aged. And the best friend was more of a roommate-with-whom-she’d-developed-a-friendship. And this description completely ignores the 6,000-year-old elf with whom the woman and her best friend enjoyed story gaming.
So let’s try this again.
This is the story of a woman who wished to find love, but who would rather play story games than actively look for it. Especially in the wake of a horrid break-up six months before from a man had who never sent her a single gift.
Until this Valentine’s Day, when she received a brand new iPhone in a box with his name on it.
Between story gaming and succumbing to the phone’s insidious sleekness, she learns that friendship trumps romance.
In Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story, award-winning author Janine A. Southard (a Seattle denizen) shows you how the geeks of Seattle live, provides a running and often-hilarious social commentary on today’s world, and reminds you that, so long as you have friends, you are never alone.